It's been a wild first half of the year in the US power sector, with announcements of gigantic natural gas plants and some long-awaited renewable energy projects coming online.

The list of 368 utility-scale plants that began operation from January to June, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration, is dominated by utility-scale solar. This is a top-heavy list, led by SunZia Wind South and SunZia Wind North in New Mexico, which went online this spring and are the largest wind farms in the country, with a combined generating capacity of 3,650 megawatts.

Next is Trumbull Energy Center in Ohio, a 900-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant that is part of an expansion of natural gas power in the PJM Interconnection grid region. The fourth-largest new plant is Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind project near Massachusetts, which has been in development for a long time and whose completion doesn’t reveal much about future trends.

It isn't until the fifth-largest new plant that we see one that’s connected to the broader trend in the data: Green River Energy Center in Utah, with 800 megawatts that includes 400 megawatts of solar and 400 megawatts of batteries. Indeed, the story of power plant completions in the first half of 2026 was mainly about utility-scale solar and batteries.